Content creation platforms have changed drastically from what they used to be. Books used to be bound and published, but now all you have to do is upload a copy and you can sell eBooks with ease. If you wanted to create visual content, you had to get the blessing of a TV channel of some kind. Now, however, all you need to do is upload whatever it is you are working on to YouTube.

Now that things are changing so much, the industries that profited off of publishing and content proliferation need to change the way they do things. Firstly, publishers specifically are going to have to take the profits they are currently making from print based media and funnel it into the creation of new digital content.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly they need to start ensuring that whatever digital experience they provide their customers with is one that would make them want to subscribe to the content creator or at least keep coming back for more. For this to happen, one thing that needs to be dealt with is managing the customer’s experience.

The Importance of The Customer Experience

Research that was recently conducted indicated that the vast majority of all companies look at inter company competition in the market to be all about the customer experience. Basically, when companies try to one up one another they do so by trying to create a better customer experience, so it’s safe to say that it’s a pretty great time to be a customer nowadays.

The industry that has been built around content creation has dubbed the product itself, content, as the most important thing they are focusing on. However, if content publishers focus on learning about how they can maximize the customer experience, they are going to benefit greatly.

Basically, you can make great content and get people subscribing to the periodical that you are managing, but this alone is not enough. You are also going to have to focus on giving your customers the best experience possible. This is sometimes even more important than trying to create top quality content.

There are a lot of different factors that impact your chances of a customer wanting to experience your content on a regular basis. How much a subscription costs, how quickly content is delivered to them, the reputation of your content creators, the quality of the materials being used and the type of content you are actually creating all have an enormous impact on whether or not a customer will end up subscribing to you in the first place.

When you have so many different factors affecting something, it is highly unlikely that any one factor is going to end up being significantly more important than the others. However, if you did have to single something out in order to narrow down your focus and attempt to create something that would be a little bit easier for you to handle in the initial stages, the customer experience is the way to go.

After all, if there is one thing that will make a customer want to never visit your platform again, it is a bad customer experience. For example, if a customer comes to your site because of your incredible content but they are then accosted with intrusive ads or overlays they are not going to enjoy that content. When they are not enjoying the content in the first place the whole point of the content is now moot. Hence, prioritizing customer experience will help you win a customer over in such a scenario.

How Customer Experience Management Works

Customer Experience Management, or simply CXM, is a process by which you can optimize each interaction that you have with a customer so as to mold a specific image regarding the company or brand that you are managing or representing. The whole point of this process is to give each customer an experience that would make them loyal to your brand or platform.

If we were to look at the publishing industry and media separately, a good customer experience leads to good word of mouth which can never be underestimated. It also leads to customers buying subscriptions and maintaining a consistent rate of renewal for these subscriptions. This is one of the best ways in which publishers can legitimately grow into something a great deal bigger than what they were previously.

The first step to making your customers loyal to you is to first figure out what they think of you right now. You also need to see how present interactions are faring. All in all, if there is one thing that is more important than anything else it is your willingness to change. If you are stubborn and try to stick to your way of doing things you will never grow. Looking at what you are doing wrong and being genuinely willing to change it is a much better way of going about things. It will help you greatly outperform your competition.

There are a lot of subgroups to the information you are collecting regarding customer experiences and interactions. You will figure out the source of your traffic, such as whether you are getting people from Google searches or shares on social media pages. You can also figure out how well your ads are faring which is another thing that can greatly optimize how well your platform does in the near future. Understanding your customers also involves understanding what made them subscribe in the first place.

A data driven approach is quite useful in this case. You can use this data in predictive models to figure out whether the new strategies you are thinking of implementing are any good or not. After all, there is no point to the new strategies if your old customers won’t like what you are doing. Figuring out how each bit of data is related is also a very important aspect of this process. Once you have enough data your predictive models are going to become a lot more accurate and you will subsequently be able to figure some very important things out. Here are three things that you can understand better:

What content fares best and why

The optimal content length

The percentage of customers that prefer an ad free experience

There is an easy way to understand how all of these things would work to benefit you. For example, if your platform or company needs an extra source of revenue, you might think about selling pop up ads. This can boost revenue, but your customers might not like it. If you use predictive models you can figure out the impact that the pop up ads will have. You can weigh the pros and cons and then figure out whether it would be worth it or not in the first place.

You can also figure out what departments and areas you need to invest in in order to grow. If a specific department of content creation is earning you the most revenue, you will be able to safely invest in that department and expand it as much as possible knowing that it is without a doubt a safe decision since people are already enjoying the things that are coming from that department on a regular basis.

This will keep customers happy because they are getting the content they truly want, and it will allow you to keep your revenue streams secure as well to the point where your company will end up being a lot more stable in the near future.

In Closing

If you want to get ahead in the world of media and publishing, it can be easy to focus on your content to the point where you are pretty much going overboard. It is important that you focus on giving your customers the best experience possible in every single area of their overall experience. Collecting data is obviously going to be a very important part of this, as is analyzing that data in the best way possible so as to better understand where you need to focus the most in order to get the best results.

This process is the single best way to get some deep insight into things like subscription rates as well as how to best optimize word of mouth marketing. After all, referrals are one of the best ways to get people to look at the content you are offering. You will also get insight into highly important things like audience retention which as we all know is more important than getting those initial clicks.

We are quickly moving towards a future where pretty much everything is going to be in a digital format. If publishers want to survive this transition, they need to focus on the customer experience more than before. It can end up meaning the difference between surviving into the digital age or dying as a relic of a print based past.

We are witnessing a veritable digital revolution, and it is changing pretty much every aspect of the world around us. Industries are now reevaluating a number of significant details regarding how they do business in order to stay competitive in the modern world. This is true for all industries, not just ones that have popped up recently as a result of the digital revolution.

Two closely related industries that have been perhaps most significantly impacted by the digital revolution are the print and media industries. People don’t want to watch television or read newspapers anymore. Or rather, they don’t want to consume the content in the same format. Instead, they want everything in a digital format, and they also want content providers that are diverse rather than having separate platforms for reading and watching content.

Hence, in light of the changes that have occurred over the past few years, media and publishing companies need to do whatever they can to stay competitive. There are a number of things that they can now focus on in their attempts. Part of this is prioritizing customer experiences and optimizing them. Providing an incredible and unique customer experience will help set companies apart and allow them to stay competitive.

One good way of improving customer experience is by using a CIAM solution. CIAM stands for customer identity and access management, and it is already widely used by a lot of companies all around the world with excellent results. CIAM is supposed to help you better understand your customer, and also make it easier for them to access the various platforms and outlets that you are managing.

It is particularly beneficial when used in conjunction with a helpdesk support software such as the one offered by Kayako, as it allows you to create a top notch customer experience to begin with and subsequently use the helpdesk to handle any customers that might not have been satisfied with the experience that you are providing. It is best to cover all of your bases, and this combination helps you do just that.

Using a CIAM solution can greatly improve the customer experience to the extent where it will bring publishing and media companies into an entirely new era. However, much like any other proposed solution, it needs to justify itself in order to be considered viable. Here some benefits that are associated with implementing a CIAM solution.

Everyone knows how important customer service is. It can mean life or death in terms of the health of a company, and suffice it to say that a lot of companies have failed in spite of a stellar product simply because of the fact that they did not take customer service as seriously as they should have and ended up alienating people that might have otherwise bought from them on a regular basis.

However, while you may know that it is important to optimize customer experience, you might not know exactly how to go about doing this as efficiently as possible. One really good place to start is by reading about the experiences of others and trying to understand what they did to solve the problems they were facing. There are a lot of books that talk about this sort of thing.

A good book can lay things out for you in a manner that is easy to understand and often entertaining. It can make the entire learning process surprisingly easy to deal with in general. The only problem is that so many books are released every year that it can be very difficult to figure out which ones are worth your time. In order to help you, we have compiled a list of some of the books you should definitely check out if you want to excel in the world of customer service.